More concerned with the pictorial language of color, line, form, texture and symbolism than with representational images, pictorial space in Bill Gingles' paintings is painted with layers of thickly troweled, scraped and scumbled paint and delicate layers of washed color. His paintings combine an interest in awareness and questions surrounding the nature of being with a life long fascination with the materiality of paint and the processes of painting itself.
Describing his practice as “vague and privately shamanistic”, Gingles says: “Painting is alchemy. Spirit and matter transformed in the crucible of painting. Nothing is static. As I change paint into paintings, I feel the paintings change me.
I paint because I have to see again and again what will happen next when I am mixed with paint. And while the paintings are clearly visible, what I bring to them seems largely hidden. Daily living is a wall behind which much of our being resides and acts in the dark. The paintings then become a means of trying to find out just who is painting them.
Painting is a moving balance between controlling the painting and allowing it to lead the way. The magic is in finding a way to let go.”
